April 23, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, contact Andre Garner, Director of Communications & Public Affairs, at 773-562-8874 or email Garner at afgarner@cookcountygov.com.

County Highway Department Kicks Off Recycled Rubber Pavement Project  

Earth Day announcement part of Stroger administration’s commitment to fostering environmentally responsible policies in Cook County government.

See below for high-resolution photo.

Chicago – Chicago, April 20, 2007 – Cook County Board President Todd Stroger was joined today by County Commissioner Mike Quigley, County Highway Department officials, and representatives of Cook County contractors at a press conference to announce the kick-off of an innovative new green road construction effort that is expected to take thousands of used tires out of the waste stream in the coming months.

“My administration is committed to supporting environmentally sound practices in our work,” says County Board President Todd Stroger. “These new Highway Department projects promise to set a tone for road-building efforts across the state, and help pull thousands of tons of waste out of our landfill stream and put them to productive use.”

The new surfacing technology will be deployed in two projects, one each in the north amd south suburbs:

• South suburbs: rubberized surfacing material will be applied on two portions of the Central Avenue resurfacing project, from 167th to 183rd, and on 175th St. from Central to Cicero. The County’s regular bituminous resurfacing mix will be applied on Central Ave. between 183rd and Volmer and on 175th St. from Central to Ridgeland, to provide for easy side-by-side comparisons of the two surfaces.

• North suburbs: rubberized surfacing material will be applied on the Bateman Road resurfacing project from Penny Road to Algonquin. The County’s regular bituminous resurfacing mix will be applied on Bateman Road from Algonquin to Lake Cook Road, again to provide easy comparison of the two surfaces.

Highway Department staff that spoke on Monday included Rupert F. Graham, Jr., P.E., Acting Superintendent; Levon Tamraz, Construction Materials Engineer; and Dan Szwaya, P.E., Pavement Geometrics Engineer. Highway staff that attended and helped answer questions included Ted Georgas, P.E., S.E., Design Bureau Chief; John Beissel, P.E., Transportation & Planning Bureau Chief; Holly Cichy, P.E., Construction Office Engineer; Michael Ewers, P.E., Construction Supervising Engineer; Eric Petraitis, P.E., Construction Supervising Engineer; and Matt Vitner, P.E., Construction Supervising Engineer.

Highway engineers and their industry partners brought samples of road surfacing materials, including the new recycled tire rubber products, to provide hands-on examples of the characteristics of the new materials.

The press conference and materials demonstration was also attended by Dan Gallagher of Gallagher Asphalt, the County’s asphalt contractor for the south suburban job, and Jay J. Behnke, P.E., president of S.T.A.T.E. Testing, L.L.C., the company that oversees much of the Highway Department’s materials testing operations and which worked with companies like Gallagher to ensure that their new surfacing formula met both environmental imperatives and standards for superior surfacing materials.

In the last year, Cook County has become a local leader in the regional effort to utilize rubberized asphalt – a product that has not been used in the Midwest in the last decade, in part because earlier experiences with using recycled rubber were deemed to fall short of road surfacing standards for quality and cost.

The Highway Department is actually taking a second look at an old recycling idea. Adding rubber from ground-up tires to asphalt pavement can improve performance and help the surface last longer. Potential benefits include longer life, resistance to rutting and cracking, reduced road noise and reduced maintenance costs. The trick is getting them mixed together properly, so that the end result yields a quality product at a reasonable cost.

In addition, used tires – those that are no longer safe to carry cars and trucks on our roads – are a major component in many dumps across the nation, including in Cook County. Tires are bulky, and 75% of the space a tire occupies is void, so whole tire landfilling requires a large amount of space – and consigns a valuable resource to the trash heap instead of the recycling bin. Rubberized asphalt paving, on the other hand, has a potent recycling advantage: up to 2,000 tires are used for each resurfaced highway lane mile.

The current County projects alone are expected to take roughly 8,000 used tires out of the trash stream – and set the stage for a major increase in the use of recycled tires in road construction projects across the region. That’s particularly important in the effort to redirect material from the nation’s trash dumps, which are rapidly filling to capacity in many states. The rubberized surface should also have better skid resistance, be quieter and perform as well as conventional materials with the extra benefit of reducing those mountains of waste tires – by over eight thousand tires from the waste stream in these roadbuilding projects alone.

The Cook County initiative has also come about quickly. Last year, Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley encouraged Highway Department officials to revisit opportunities to use the road surfacing material, and in March 2006 the County Board formally instructed the Highway Department to use ground tire rubber – GTR – in a pilot paving project. The Highway Department invited other agencies to join the County in forming a task force to pool their expertise, and agencies that joined included the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), and the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (ISTHA), along with S.T.A.T.E. Testing, and others. Each brought technical experience to the task force and all are interested in using GTR in road projects. The committee met several times, reviewed current research, developed a specification and identified several potential County GTR projects for 2007 construction.

After the group’s first meeting, the ISTHA placed three GTR test sections on the Tri-State Tollway. The ISTHA hopes that reduced road noise might yield quieter pavements and happier neighbors. In addition, Chicago DOT incorporated GTR into a porous asphalt pavement section and CDOT hopes this can become another recycling tool in its Green Alleys Program.  The agencies are testing and monitoring the performance of these projects to measure potential benefits.

A local company, Seneca Petroleum, is also playing an important role in the GTR revival. Seneca, long a provider of liquid asphalt cement, now includes rubberized asphalt cement in their product line. Seneca adds the GTR to the regular asphalt cement at their terminal in Crestwood. Pre-blending improves the quality control of the GTR liquid and eliminates the need for asphalt paving companies to rent or purchase blending and storage equipment for their plants.

Cook County’s partner S.T.A.T.E. Testing, L.L.C., which does much of the County’s materials testing and helps build specs for the Highway Department’s road-building products, also worked closely with contractors that include Gallagher Asphalt, the contractor for the south suburban pilot project, to get the materials’ mix just right.

“We work very closely with our partners in the construction and materials industries to ensure that the products we use on the job site meet the highest standards,” says Acting County Highway Superintendent Rupert Graham. “Gallagher has been an innovator in the use of recycled asphalt, and eagerly took up the challenge of adding recycled tires to our pavement mix. Companies like Seneca provide an invaluable local resource, and our other contractors and private partners are eager to take advantage of innovations in the field.”

The County Board awarded contracts for the first two roads to be built with the new material — one in the south suburbs and one in the north suburbs –on April 18, and moved to announce those road projects publicly in the wake of this weekend’ Earth Day events. Each road will have one section built with conventional asphalt and another section built with rubberized asphalt, allowing the Highway Department to monitor the pavements to verify how well the rubberized material works.

The task force itself has been so successful in pushing forward this effort that participants have decided to use it on a permanent basis as a forum for brainstorming and collaboration on a host of related projects in the coming months.

“The idea of mixing ground tire rubber in asphalt pavements has been around since the 1960’s,” says the County’s Materials Engineer, Levon Tamraz. “But most states, including IDOT, were dissatisfied with their early experience. Costs in Illinois initially ran, on average, 30% more than conventional paving and performance results were mixed. With new technology, both the cost and performance issues have been tackled and GRT is vastly more attractive.”

California and Arizona have helped push the envelop in the use GTR, and Florida and Texas now have large GTR programs, as well. In Illinois, the first public agency to take a second look is Cook County.

The Cook County Highway Department maintains more than 1,400 lane miles of roads, and has overseen the expenditure of almost a quarter of a billion dollars on road improvement projects throughout the region in the last five years – including bridges and overpasses that represent critical transit points for people and products in the region. The Highway Department also manages County roads that are part of the major arterial network that leads to and from area expressways and toll roads – and that are literally a lifeline for thousands of local residents, from police to paramedics, and vital transportation corridors for workers and commerce.

The Department’s responsibilities include winter snow plowing and salting, summer resurfacing, the design of traffic signals, street lighting, contract plans for storm sewer systems, culverts and bridges that require hydraulic analysis, and more – all of the nuts and bolts operations it takes to keep people and goods moving on our transportation system."

For more information, contact Chris Geovanis in the Cook County Department of Public Affairs & Communications at 312-603-0302 or by email at chgeovan@cookcountygov.com. 

# # #